May 11th, 2008
Firefox 3 RC1 code complete, due in late May
Mozilla now expects Firefox 3 RC1 will be ready to go in late May.
RC1 was originally planned to be released last month but several bugs have arisen during the final phase of development that needed to be addressed, including problems with the new Places bookmarking feature, themes UI and conflicts with Google’s Safebrowing add on.
It looks like are systems are go aside from a trio of minor issues.
”We are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) … Last night we hit Zarro bugs for Firefox 3. 3 New issues have arisen since then,” wrote Mike Schrep, a Firefox 3 developer who posted a status update on the project Saturday. He said the team planned kickoff builds for RC1 beginning this weekend and would begin the Q&A cycle for Rc1 on monday.
”The QA cycle for RC1 is more extensive than the betas since this may be our last milestone,” he wrote. “If no unexpected issues arise, RC1 should ship late May. ”
RC1 will be Firefox 3 if no shwostoppers are found, he added.
The Firefox team has declined repeated requests to discuss the status of Firefox 3 and said it would speak publicly beginning in late May.
Sources familiar with the Mozilla Firefox 3 project told this blogger Firefox 3 is expected to ship in June, but Mozilla spokespeople would not confirm that timeframe.
May 9th, 2008
The Obama Party and the Googlization of politics
Barack Obama is the Google of modern American politics.
MyBarackObama and Google share strengths and, perhaps, weaknesses.
I just described Google’s problem with the ASP loophole. By supporting the loophole Google maintains its proprietary advantage but risks losing friends in the open source community. This is a loss it can bear.
It can bear the loss because its immense infrastructure allows it independence from this kind of community pressure. It can act autonomously, in its own interest, when that interest conflicts with others’ ideology.
Barack Obama is doing essentially the same thing, as Marc Ambinder wrote on The Atlantic’s blog recently.
May 9th, 2008
Google’s open source problem is Affero
The best open source protection for “the cloud,” as Gordon Haff notes today, is the Affero GPL license. (Picture from our Tech Republic’s GeekEnd blog, written by Jay Garmon.)
Affero closes the “ASP loophole” described by Fabrizio Capobianco here in March. It defines what SaaS delivers as software and requires code sharing.
When the FSF approved Version 3 of the Affero GPL in November, they wrote that “It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server.”
And there hangs our tale. Google can’t live with Affero. If Google’s services are under Affero, Google has to give away its “secret sauce,” the code which makes it different. (Its secret source, as it were.)
So Affero projects aren’t allowed into Google Code. ClipperZ has had to move to Sourceforge as a result, and other projects are moving over as well.
Google’s resistance to Affero, its insistence on maintaining the ASP loophole, is the “smoking gun” some in the open source community point to when questioning Google’s open source bonafides. They see it as, well, evil.
So you’ll see more projects like Piwik and OpenX, both of which bill themselves as “open source alternatives” to Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager, respectively.
Right now such losses are no big deal. But as Google gains in power, it’s as inevitable as Newton’s Third Law that this Affero controversy will grow.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
May 8th, 2008
Sun xVM Virtualbox puts Mac on x86
The newest version of Sun’s xVM Virtualbox adds support for Apple’s OSX. (Mac ad satire from Jazebski.Pl in Poland.)
The new version is dubbed Version 2.6 and was released during last week’s CommunityDays event.
This is the first open source virtualization to support the Mac, and while the support is not yet complete (you can only run OSX as a host, not a guest) it could become a real competitor to VMWare and Xen.
There are two versions, community and proprietary. Both are available as free downloads, but the latter is only free for personal use. The proprietary version also includes USB support and a Remote Display Protocol (RDP) server.
This is the first release of the tool since Sun bought its maker, Innotek, in February.
As our own Gordon Haff noted then, xVM Virtualbox is a “Type 2″ hypervisor, running on top of another operating system, in the manner of Microsoft’s Virtual Server. This means more hardware overhead for the user.
And, of course, the whole idea here is that xVM Virtualbox provides an “on-ramp” for other Sun products, especially OpenSolaris, which can already run as a host in Version 2.6.
May 8th, 2008
Samba 3.2 reflects open source project’s ambivalence toward Microsoft
Samba’s forthcoming version 3.2 release capitalizes on Microsoft’s interoperability commitments while also guarding against patent covenants that threaten the GPL.
Samba 3.2, which is expected to be released in roughly one month’s time, offers improved integration with the Active Directory in Windows Server 2003 and recently released Windows Server 2008 and offers support for Vista clients authenticating through Kerberos.
Version 3.2, for instance, offers full support for Windows Server 2003 cross-forest transitive trusts and one-way domain trusts, support for establishing interdomain trust relationships with Windows Server 2008, the ability to join to Windows server 2008 domains and built-in support for Active Directory LDAP signing policy.
Samba is file and print serving software for Linux/Unix servers that provide interoperability with Microsoft’s SMB/CIFS clients and servers. In recent years, project lead Jeremy Allison (updated: pictured below right, dessed as a self described cyberman, leading the annual Golden Penguin quiz show at LinuxWorld 2007) has been an outspoken critic of Microsoft’s alleged efforts to undermine such interoperability efforts. In an e-mail discussion with this ZDNet blogger, Allison agreed the situation is improving. Microsoft is making more protocols available and sent engineers to its recent Samba XP conference where engineers from both organizations drank beer together and discussed future joint engineering events. 
Yet, in spite of a warming up between the two organizations, Microsoft and Samba remain on opposite sides of the fence, Allison said.
Samba’s support for GPLv3 in Samba 3.2 — its first incarnation of the revised open source license –guards against the kind of patent covenants that violate the spirit of open source development and free distribution. Last year, the open source community cried foul after Microsoft and Novell entered into a patent protection deal that was widely viewed as a legal end run around the GPL. The Free Software Foundation acted swiftly to enact the GPLv3 to prevent Microsoft from making such arrangements with other open source software companies.
As part of its rollout of Windows Server 2008, and its interoperability promise, Microsoft has been promoting its strengthening relationships with prominent open source projects — including those that tangled with Redmond in the past. Still, Allison sought to clear up any notion that the two organizations are now joined at the hip.
“Samba doesn’t have a partnership with Microsoft. We joined the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) and they have the agreement with Microsoft. Having said that, Microsoft has been very cooperative and friendly, and the engineering relationship is getting back to the way it used to be in 1994-1997, which is a great relief to us,” said Allison. “Microsoft engineers are now collaborating directly with us on protocol details and improving the documentation, and we envisage further collaboration in the future. Now, about those software patents.”
In that email, Allison scoffed at the idea that Microsoft’s interoperability agenda would signify an end to Samba.
“That’s not what the promise means. What I think it means is that they are no longer actively preventing people from interoperating with them, not that they’re proactively interoperating with others. The onus is still on us to do the work I’m afraid, which means Samba is more important now than ever.”
Beyond Samba 3.2, Samba is working on a major 4.0 upgrade that will feature support for clustered file systems. Experimental support will be offered in version 3.2
May 8th, 2008
Are we all just cognitive surplus?
Clay Shirky, and his truly handsome hairline, is not into the ragehol like I am. That is, he does not anger easily.
But he admits to nearly losing it recently, when after describing a Wikipedia skirmish to a TV producer, he got the question
“Where do they find the time?”
I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
The cognitive surplus, all that time we waste in front of the idiot box, he estimates at 200 billion hours a year, in the U.S. alone.
Shirky compares TV to gin, which masked the wrenching societal changes of the 18th century industrial revolution in an alcoholic fog.
That’s where the time building Wikipedia comes from, he argues, the world waking up from its TV-induced hangover and coming to personal terms with our post-industrial age. Open source is just one stream in this Kahani of time.
Interesting thesis. Just how big is this cognitive surplus, and what are we doing with it?
May 7th, 2008
Competing with your own channel
Matt Asay has a truly fine piece out today about open source vendors competing with their own channels.
What he’s talking about are companies that sell support for “community” versions of your product. (I have no idea if John Wingert’s sales techniques work, but his picture encapsulates the sales process.)
Matt offers some great advice but there’s one bit that maybe he missed.
Partnership.
Members of an open source sales channel are really super-users. They need to be treated as such.
That means the best possible support, the best online resources, sharing of sales leads, all the commitments (and more) you give and get from your user base.
If a vendor is getting all this from you, there’s no reason why they should try and rob their partner of support revenues. It would be like taking money out of their own pocket.
I understand Matt’s idea of formalizing all this through contracts and prohibitions, but too much formality, like a pre-nuptial agreement, may keep the marriage from taking place at all.
My guess is that not all “channel partners” really start out to be in business at all. They’re users serving other users.
I know this was the case for an old college classmate of mine. He started out, way back then, just helping other people out. Now he’s a big executive.
It’s in managing a process of turning amateur support into professional relationships where an open source sales manager will really earn his mettle.
Just remember, as John’s course notes, it’s a seduction.
May 7th, 2008
Sun’s continuing open source problem
Despite its best efforts Sun Microsystems still has a big open source problem.
Commitment. (Affordable Wedding Bands sells rings in both gold and platinum.)
Any salesman is expecting a commitment from a buyer. But an open source salesman is expecting a deeper commitment. A commitment of time, even an emotional commitment.
Those commitments are necessary before you can expect someone else to write code for you, fix bugs for you, and test code they know is inferior.
The problem for Sun is this must be a two-way commitment.
When people read that Sun was even thinking of taking mySQL back, or listen to executives moan about the open source business model, it raises questions. Questions which all the blog posts in the world won’t answer.
It comes back to the problem I discussed yesterday. If you’re focused on the gold you’re not focused on the straw. These commitments of time and energy are the straw.
Anything which distracts Sun from that focus on the commitment its non-paying customers already have to it limits its chances of making money.
This is not a problem proprietary brands have. There the commitment is limited to a financial one, and both sides of the transaction understand the limits, which are specified in the contract.
But open source demands more than a financial commitment of its users. And if you want to earn that trust, you must be committed in turn. Committed to the open source process, and committed to the idea of commitment.
If that makes open source sound like a marriage, well it does. Every user who depends on a project is putting sweat equity into it. They feel as much a part of the project as its nominal sponsor.
Undestand that, commit to it, and you can make a success in open source. Focus only on the money and you don’t stand a chance.
May 6th, 2008
Oracle architect says there ought to be one Linux distribution: Red Hat
One Oracle exec said there should be only one Linux distribution — Red Hat — and claimed there will be no fragmentation of that code base.
In an interview with the Linux Foundation recently, Oracle’s chief corporate architect said Oracle Unbreakable Linux is not a product but a support program and he believes that there ought to be only one Linux distribution — his rival’s code base.
“It’s really our desire to encourage the market to move to a single distribution. Red Hat has by far the largest market share in the data center, and especially for Oracle customers. So it made sense to pick Red Hat as our base,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect. “Now if the Red Hat and Novell numbers were reversed, we would have picked [Novell] SUSE.”
He contends that Red Hat and Novell should not try to compete with differentiated Linux distributions but purely on the support side of the business.
Oracle’s homegrown implementation of Red Hat – Oracle Unbreakable Linux — was misunderstood as a separate Linux distribution when it was introduced in October of 2006, he said. The database and apps vendor will continue to back Red Hat’s Linux code and won’t cause fragmentation, Screven said.
“We don’t really view ourselves as being in the distribution business. We see ourselves as being in the Linux support business,” Screven said. “I think there’s an important difference there. I mean, we don’t try to compete by creating a differentiated distribution. We don’t try to compel customers to subscribe by withholding binaries. You know, anyone on the planet can download and use Oracle Enterprise Linux binaries for free. You know, if you want support from us, you pay us. But we’re not trying to compete in the distribution business.”
The climate was a lot chillier when Oracle Unbreakable Linux launched 17 months ago, shortly after Red Hat acquired JBoss and formally entered the middleware race against Oracle.
Lest one think there’s a warming between the two rivals, Oracle is ramping up its competition with Red Hat on the support side of the business. Screven claimed that Oracle has been providing patches for its Linux customers and partners since 2003 and that Unbreakable Linux was merely a formalization of a program that existed because neither Red Hat nor Novell provide the level of enterprise support.
“The existing Linux vendors I think have a little bit different point of view and I don’t think that they were doing a very good job. You know, they were charging a lot of money for support levels that, in our minds, were insufficient for many enterprise customers,” Screven said. “And the implication is that a lot of those customers were discouraged from using Linux for mission critical systems in their data centers. Now, we really want Linux to be the default choice for Oracle customers in their data centers. So we got into the business to fix it.”
Oracle’s comments were posted on Tuesday, as Red Hat launched JBoss operations Network 2.0 as an enhanced enterprise middleware management platform.
Screven said Red Hat’s claims that Oracle cannot guarantee 100 percent binary compatibility of its patched version of RHEL with RHEL are not valid.
“Find a place where there is a functional difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux binaries and Oracle Enterprise Linux binaries. The only practical difference that I know of is the difference in label string,” he said. “Obviously, we produce a lot of conventional software running on Linux, including the database, that we develop and we test on Oracle Enterprise Linux. We do not test on Red Hat Linux, yet we release our products to our customers certified and supported on Red Hat Linux. And we can do that because we know with certainty that they are the same.”
“We’re very, very focused on making sure that what the binaries that we distribute either as, you know, individual package updates or as complete installs is completely compatible with Red Hat Linux,” Screven said in the interview, which was posted on the Linux Foundation web site Tuesday. “And, you know, our goal is to make sure we do not cause any fragmentation in the Linux market space. “
May 6th, 2008
Do we need another CERT?
Yes.
Google’s backing of oCERT is a major milestone in the history of open source.
It’s not that I have anything against the Computer Emergency Response TeamCERT at Carnegie-Mellon. They do important work, not only in identifying risks but in educating people on them.
UPDATE: A CERT spokesman notes they’ve licensed the term, dropped the longer form of the name (like IBM did back in the day) and licensed it to oCERT.
What makes oCERT important is here, in the famous 2000 essay by Bruce Schneier on the “window of vulnerability.”
As Schneier noted, vulnerabilities, like fame, have five distinct phases.* A vulnerability is discovered, announced, becomes popular, gets patched, and then the patch is disseminated.
It’s the last bit where the differences lie in open source. Windows machines are patched centrally, and that patch is distributed widely, quickly, sometimes forcefully.
Whether you get your patches directly from Microsoft or from a security vendor, the process is the same.
We have a well-established protocol for distributing fixes, so that curve downward, from distribution of a patch to fixing it, is sharp. It’s like herding cows.
While open source doesn’t suffer as many vulnerabilities, its dispersed nature makes fixing them more like herding cats than cows.
A central system like oCERT is needed so that, as open source gains market share, and malware writers target Linux, we can keep that last curve sharp.
* The five stages of fame. Who’s Dana? Get me Dana! Get me someone like Dana! Get me a young Dana! Who’s Dana? Insert your name for mine.
May 6th, 2008
Oracle: ‘We just don’t care’ about Sun-MySQL Merger’
Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect predicts the Sun-MySQL merger will have little impact on his company or on Linux.
In an interview with the Linux Foundation, Edward Screven, who reports directly to Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, maintains Sun’s patronage of its open source rival won’t affect Oracle sales. MySQL is an open source database, while Oracle’s database is not.
“We just don’t care,” Screven said when asked by Linux Foundation Exec Director Jim Zemlin about the deal concluded earlier this year. “I mean, we don’t see MySQL very often, again, in competitive deals. It’s out there, but it’s not very often that a database sales rep comes back and says, “I had to compete for the business against MySQL.’”
Screven, who has been an Oracle employee since 1986, doesn’t see it as a big win for Sun’s open source vision or Linux. Both companies’ databases run on Linux, Windows and Unix.
“I don’t really think Sun’s acquisition of MySQL has a lot of implications for Linux. I mean, certainly there are Linux deployments that exist because of MySQL and if Sun screws up MySQL, then of course that may mean fewer Linux deployments,” Screven said. “But, you know, there are plenty of database choices on Linux, commercial and otherwise. I think Linux is much stronger than anything that Sun could possibly do to MySQL. ”
Screven’s comments were reportedly made in an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation as part of its Open Voices series. The webcast will be aired today. Excerpts of the interview were published in a transcript released to the media by the Linux Foundation last night.
May 6th, 2008
Open source as the villain in its own story
Maybe because of JavaOne and Sun’s well-known concerns about open source profit the idea of proprietary hooks which make people pay for open source software is big again.
After all, if the code is free and visible why should an enterprise customer write a check to its sponsor? (Buy this guy now, while he’s on sale, from Buycostume.com. I’ll explain why in a minute.)
When code has a BSD-type license, like Eclipse, the answer is that the project isn’t producing products at all, but the raw material for products. Companies are free to write, and sell, proprietary extensions.
When code has a GPL license, the answer is not so clear. Companies may feel that their own code contributions, or help with bug fixes and beta testing, are compensation enough.
Savio Rodrigues of Infoworld (and IBM) divides customers by time and money, suggesting that holding some code back as an incentive for conversion makes sense.
Matt Asay of C|Net (and Alfresco) suggests the big money is in peripheral services, like systems management or SaaS, so the core need not be hidden.
To complicate matters further we have the fears of Twitter, a proprietary site whose functions could easily be cloned into a more powerful, networked open source project.
In other words this question of opening or closing code to maximize profit is no longer unique to open source. When open source is seen as a potential competitor it hits everyone.
This may be the key point. As a successful business model, open source is putting new competitive pressures on companies which are not all economic.
The goodwill of a powerful community can be a great asset, but like this site’s credibility it’s an asset that can disappear in a heartbeat.
Ask the folks at CoreCodec, trying to contain a PR storm over an action they’ve already taken back.
Reputation, credibility, and goodwill have no place on a public company balance sheet, but these values are just as important to software companies now as they are to politicians.
To Matt, Savio and others in the business the question is how much gold they can spin this straw into. But the wise man knows it’s how much straw you have which really determines your bottom line.
In journalism we have a word for this straw. We call it credibility. It’s hard to win, easy to lose. Every journalist worth their byline knows it’s the only real asset we have.
So welcome to my world, boys. How the straw becomes gold may appear to be magic, but the straw is what you need to focus on. That’s why the fellow at the top of the page is the villain in his own story.
May 5th, 2008
OpenSolaris released, aimed at storage market
Sun is officially launching OpenSolaris at its Community One developer conference this morning today in San Francisco.
A version for x86 machines, 686 MBytes in size, is already available for download from here.
Technically only pre-release versions were available before now. The Solaris code base itself has been open since 2005. Now you can get a quick download-and-install of the whole OpenSolaris operating system.
The release party will also include a panel on building Web communities featuring our own Matt Asay.
OpenSolaris may make its first big splash in Web storage. Sun says developers can create an OpenSolaris storage server in 10 minutes with its software. I can’t get a new iPod out of the package in that time.
Sun’s open source moves have been controversial, here as elsewhere, with some warning that OpenSolaris is a “trojan horse” that will keep those who use it from ever going back to Linux. Or it could be complementary.
Which do you think is right?
Loading …May 5th, 2008
CoreAVC for Linux project coming back to Google
CoreAVC for Linux, which was removed from Google after a DMCA takedown notice from CoreCodec, will be coming back.
The project provides patches enabling open source media players to use CoreAVC software under Linux.
A CoreCodec worker using the screen name BetaBoy told an internal forum last night that “The DMCA removal request and the project reinstatement was been sent to Google.”
BetaBoy also apologized for a “disconnect” with the developer of CoreAVC, writing “there is a general need for CoreAVC on Linux” with a “GStreamer Plug-in ready to launch.
“We are also looking at releasing CorePlayer Professional for Linux (QT Version) but we need to package this up for distribution,” BetaBoy added.
Slashdot posted a complaint about the takedown last night and our own Steven Shankland was on top of the story, posting about it at about 1 AM Eastern Time. (But even the best reporters must sleep.)
As to what caused the breakdown between CoreCodec and the developer, BetaBoy wrote, “This is not about copyright (even thought the DMCA deals with that), this is mostly about reverse engineering without permission under the DMCA”
By giving the developer permission to do this, the problem has been solved, BetaBoy concluded.
May 4th, 2008
Commercial OpenSolaris ships
After a three-year incubation period, Sun’s long promised OpenSolaris, the third open source variant of Unix, was officially delivered Monday.
“It’s the first Opensolaris operating system that’s fully supported,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing for Sun.
OpenSolaris will compete in a class that includes BSD and Linux, but the latter is its prime competitive target. Sun is already talking up the emergence of the so-called SAMP stack – Solaris, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl - and, as Dana B notes, OpenSolaris’ storage potential.
What an uphill battle it will be for Sun.
Unlike Linux, neither the proprietary version nor the open source version of Solaris is released under the GPL. Although it is released under a homegrown, OSI approved license, this no doubt hurts OpenSolaris’ prospects in the marketplace.
Nevertheless, Sun is selling its story hard, promising commercial support for both the closed and open source versions of its Unix OS, which neither Red Hat nor Novell can match for their respective Linux distributions. Neither Red Hat’s Fedora nor Novell’s openSUSE, for example, come with commercial support like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.
Sun claims that fees for annual commercial support – which range from $320 to $2,000 per system – are e in line with Solaris commercial support costs and are priced less than the nnual support for Red Hat Advanced Server.
Sun also maintains that several key features of OpenSolaris – namely DTrace performance monitoring, the ZFS file system with rollback capability and new Live CD installation and Image Packaging System (IPS) (see in screen shot below) – give it a technical edge over its Linux competitors and Solaris 10. Sun is happy to say it is the first open source distribution with ZFS as the default file system.
Sun even nailed a deal with Amazon to ensure that OpenSolaris would be a supported operating system of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Beta availability of that was announced today.
The inclusion of a modern desktop operating system based on OpenOffice 2.0, GNOME, Firefox and CompBiz, moreover, makes OpenSolaris a compelling alternative to Linux, Sun executives say. Additionally, the integration of Solaris’ Container virtualization like technology and availability of VirtualBox for running Windows, Linux on OpenSolaris (and plans for a Xen-based OpenSolaris appliance later this year) gives Sun a decent virtualization story.
One analyst said OpenSolaris will be of interest to Sun junkies but likely poses little real threat to Linux. “OpenSolaris is likely to be of interest to a few audiences: traditional Solaris and/or Unix users interested in an open source version of the operating system, audiences interested in one or more of the differentiating technologies in the platform, and Linux users that may be curious about a competing *nix-like environment,” said Stephen O’Grady, an analyst with RedMonk. “At the present time, there isn’t a ton of crossover from buyers of one to buyers of the other, so it’s not a clear and present danger [to Linux].”
Sun will announce OpenSolaris’ commercial debut and show off a new logo to kick off its Community One conference today but there’s little new here really.
Sun anointed its OpenSolaris community in 2005, and has released several developer previews before today’s release.
Some hoped OpenSolaris would be released under some version of the GPL or commonly accepted open source license like the ones governing the development of other open source projects it sponsors such as open source Java, Open Office and MySQL.
But it is not to be – at least for now. Sun is going with its non GPL-compatible Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) – which allows developers to work within the open source world while also maintaining control of their intellectual property. That is a mistake if Sun intends to steal significant share from Linux.
“Sun releases software in a variety of license and we’re looking at one source communities and having discussions with many people,” McHugh said. “We do have products under the GPL.”
So why not OpenSolaris?
[Click image to enlarge.]
May 2nd, 2008
Will OpenSolaris bring a chill to Sun-Ubuntu romance?
You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.
That seems to be the mantra of Ubuntu and Sun, both open source underdogs whose relationship and mutual platform support has been growing for three years. On the eve of the release of OpenSolaris, both companies are banging the drum that the warm ties continue. But will it?
Canonical announced that its recently launched “Hardy Heron” would be the first commercial Linux distribution to support Sun’s OpenJDK.
Support for OpenJDK and NetBeans in the latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is significant because both are available in Ubuntu’s universe repository, which mean they are free of charge. Red Hat’s Fedora 9, which will be introduced later this month, will also feature an OpenJDK implementation — but Ubuntu is the only commercial Linux release that has the support now.
Sun scratched back, becoming the first server vendor to certify Ubuntu’s 8.04 server edition on its x86 servers Sun Fire X2100 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers. HP has said it will ensure compatibility of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server edition on its servers, but no certification.
Sun and Ubuntu have a history of cooperation that dates back to 2006, when Ubuntu announced that its 6.06 Long Term Release version of Ubuntu would support Sun’s “Cool Threads” technology and exploit several Sun Sparc-based servers as part of Sun’s OpenSparc Initiative.
And, at the launch of Ubuntu 7.07 last year, Canonical announced that it would support a full Java stack including Glassfish version 1.0 Java, Enterprise Edition 5, Java Platform, Standard Edition (JDK 6), Java DB 10.2 (based on Apache Derby) and Netbeans IDE 5.5.
And Ubuntu’s support for Sun’s openJDK — and Sun’s embracing of Ubuntu server — suggests that the two intend to carry the partnership forward.
Still, there’s little doubt the launch of OpenSolaris next week might dampen that spark. Sun’s open source Unix operating system, after all, will compete head on against Ubuntu Linux. Canonical founder and Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth is no fan of Sun’s CDDL license. In a past post, Shuttleworth said the ZFS and DTrace facilities in OpenSolaris would add value to its Linux distro — but only if it were available under the GPL.
It helps that Debian founder Ian Murdock, the former CTO of the Linux Foundation, heads up Sun’s developer tools and open source community services, including Project Indiana. (Ubuntu is based on Debian). But there’s no guarantee the warmth will continue if Sun’s OpenSolaris takes off. 
May 2nd, 2008
The cloud era and open source
My co-blogger Paula has a great piece over at Dan Kuznetsky’s shop this morning, concerning an open source cloud computing platform called Enomaly.
Everybody has a cloud these days. Google has a cloud. Microsoft has a cloud. Sun has a cloud. Now, you can have a cloud of your own.
These are cloudy days indeed. (This cloud screensaver lives at Stephen Brooks’ Web site, and has been accessed 3.99 million times. Let’s all push him over the 4 million mark)
Question is, what does this mean for open source?
Personally I think this is a very positive trend for open source. What is happening is that we are separating issues of hardware and software on what we used to call the server side.
You develop what you want, how you want, and then you toss it into the cloud to run. If you like Microsoft development tools you use ‘em. If you prefer open source tools you use ‘em.
Is it Windows? Is it Linux? Is it a bird or a plane? Who really cares?
The cloud computing trend levels the playing field for developers, and tools. Microsoft’s community will compete with all the open source communities out there.
Questions of “server market share” will go away, replaced by market shares